After three decades of economic stagnation, broken promises, and failed efforts to resurrect this once-thriving industrial port, pessimism and economic insecurity have a stranglehold on Coos Bay.

It's a place that seems to have only a past, a fading memory of hard-working people earning middle-class wages in the mills. Before the early eighties recession. Before the spotted owl. Before they shut the public forests.

Today, residents describe their community as "the other Oregon," a place locked in a slow economic spiral. That reality has bred cynicism and mistrust – of the leaders they elected, of corporate developers, even of neighbors.

Now a new, 21st Century extraction-based industry is on the horizon. A Canadian energy company, Veresen Inc., is proposing to build an international export terminal for liquefied natural gas on an overgrown sand spit that juts into the Pacific Ocean north of town.

For some, it's the economic home run that will bring back the Bay Area's halcyon days. Others want to believe, but have significant, unanswered environmental and public safety concerns. Finally, there's a core group convinced this project is a grave and desperate mistake, one that will change the area's character forever.

Physically, it's actually three projects in one: a gas liquefaction, storage and shipping facility that will tower 14 stories above the Coos Bay channel; a 420-megawatt natural-gas-fired power plant to energize the facility's four super chillers; and a 36-inch-wide feeder pipeline stretching halfway across Oregon. The scale will be enormous, possibly overwhelming.

Financially it's unprecedented -- a $7.5 billion construction project that would be the largest in Oregon history. More than $4 billion of that total would be plowed into the North Spit, vastly expanding the local tax base.

And emotionally, it goes to the core of the area's historical identity and residents' differing aspirations for the future.

Rekindling the past

At first glance, this community of 25,000 doesn't seem like a logical place to site a gas export facility.

The nearest gas hub is more than 200 miles away in Malin, on the other side of the Coast Range and the Cascades. And Coos Bay lacks any of the infrastructure that existing oil and gas hubs on the Gulf Coast have.

Geologically, there are big question marks. As many residents point out, the project is situated on a sand spit in the middle of an earthquake and tsunami zone, one that experts predict will be active relatively soon. The massive gas facility would be 1.3 miles north of the communities of North Bend and Coos Bay.

On the other hand, Jordan Cove could be the first and potentially the only LNG terminal on the West Coast of the United States, with a distinct cost advantage for exporting gas to Asia.

Jordan Cove site tourProject backers provide a tour of the proposed site for the Jordan Cove LNG terminal in Coos Bay.

Besides, this is no pristine coastal preserve.

Since the first fur traders stepped ashore in in 1820s, Coos Bay has been about extraction, whether it was gold, coal, fish or lumber.

Only a few decades ago, this was the largest lumber exporting port in the world. Residents are accustomed to heavy industry. Indeed, while communities down the West Coast have rejected LNG terminals out of hand, many South Coast residents welcome the project with open arms.

Their reasons are plain. While employment would be highly variable over the 42-month construction period, the monthly job count would average 980, according to an economic impact study paid for by Jordan Cove. Wages would average almost $97,000 a year, nearly three times the county's median household income. Construction employment would peak at 2,200 and the study suggests Coos County businesses would see more than $200 million in spending by those workers on everything from entertainment and gas to groceries and household goods.

Jordan Cove says the terminal, once operating, would create 150 direct jobs and deliver more than $400 million in community service fees to the county, schools, and other taxing authorities in the first 20 years after construction starts.

"We've been on a downturn for 30 years," said a life-long resident who asked not to be identified for fear his business would be blackballed by the project's opponents. "We've gone from 35 mills down to two. You see the Elliott State Forest locked up. You see the fishing going away because of restrictions. You see a continual contraction. Then all of the sudden you see a sector that could create some good-paying, long-term jobs."

Potentially transformative

An LNG facility would make Coos Bay a bit player in the natural gas revolution that is upending America's energy economics.

A predecessor company to Calgary-based Veresen originally proposed Jordan Cove in 2004 as a terminal to import gas, mostly for customers in California. At the time, industry experts were forecasting national gas shortages due to declines in Canadian exports and U.S. domestic production.

Since the advent of hydraulic fracturing in shale formations, however, the supply projection has flipped to long-term surpluses.

Consequently, Jordan Cove has been refashioned as an export facility for those same U.S. and Canadian producers to ship to more lucrative Asian markets.

Veresen operates pipelines, gas processing and power plants, but has no experience as an LNG developer and nowhere near the financial heft to pull off a $7.5 billion project on its own. If the project gets regulatory approval, recent industry experience suggests financing would not be an issue, though it would almost certainly involve multiple equity investors, including customers.

Veresen hasn't said how much ownership it would retain, but it hopes to make a final investment decision early next year. In the meantime, its stock has become a speculative play on the project's success. Shares are up 40 percent since last fall, and it recently closed a $285 million share offering to help fund development efforts, which executives say could be transformative for the company.

Port officials, local politicians, labor groups and many chamber of commerce members in Coos Bay need no convincing.

They believe the project would be transformative for the area. Their script mirrors Jordan Cove's, touting the jobs, the money for schools and the economic halo effect this project could bring. Boosters speak of the facility in almost spiritual terms, as a catalyst for not only economic salvation, but a psychological renaissance.

"This is an opportunity to recapture our own initiative, our own direction," said Timm Slater, a long-time Weyerhaeuser employee who now runs the Bay Area Chamber of Commerce. "It restores the confidence of the community so that, yes, we do have control of our own fate, our own future."

The project has yet to win its first major siting permit, and the number of permanent jobs is estimated at only 150. But the hope is that the infrastructure will bring a tidal shift in Coos Bay's fortunes.

For starters, backers say, the tonnage from LNG exports would get the Port of Coos Bay close to the "high use port" category that guarantees ongoing access to federal dredging money.

The marine terminal to be carved out of the North Spit includes a second shipping berth and an adjacent industrial lot owned by the Port of Coos Bay. The whole site sits on an underused railroad line to Eugene that the Port purchased in 2009.

About the series

Over the next couple months, The Oregonian is reporting a series of stories on what the Jordan Cove project in Coos Bay involves, its effect on communities and individuals and the global economics driving this push to export natural gas.

Send your questions to investigative reporter Ted Sickinger. What do you want us to find out or explain? How do you view this bid for economic development? Email Sickinger.

With those pieces in place, and the availability of natural gas and a new power plant, backers contend, the North Spit becomes a more attractive place to put a container terminal, a bulk commodity terminal or a log export terminal.

"This project will put Coos Bay on the world map," said Mark Wall, the Oregon forestry manager for Roseburg Forest Products, which operates a wood-chip export terminal next to the Jordan Cove site. "It will show the world that you can build something of this scale in Oregon."

Wall is also the co-chair of Boost Southwest Oregon, an advocacy group formed with Veresen funding to run a public campaign in favor of the project. Wall says the organization now boasts 1,000 members.

"I look to Jordan Cove to be the catalyst that starts a new era for Coos Bay and a more prosperous future."

The final option

The pieces tie together nicely on paper. But some residents say they've heard it all before, the Powerball reverie of a down-on-its-luck community that has had more than its share of economic pipe dreams.

Wim De Vriend runs the Blue Heron Bistro in downtown Coos Bay, a local fixture that offers an eclectic mix of German fare, seafood and international beers. De Vriend literally wrote the book on local economic development, a phone book-sized commentary called "The Job Messiahs" that he sells from behind the counter.

The book chronicles 40 years worth of taxpayer-funded efforts to rekindle Coos Bay's industrial past, an effort De Vriend equates to a continuous "recycling of pie-in-the-sky thinking" that he says has compiled "an astonishing record of failure."

De Vriend's list of phantom projects and short-lived flameouts include a company that wanted to construct oil drilling platforms for the North Slope, a fish waste processing plant, a coal export terminal, a pulp mill, a chromium smelter, a steel mill and a garbage burning plant.

Two consultants have already been paid to study the feasibility of a container terminal in Coos Bay and found it unlikely. De Vriend believes the temporary boom from terminal construction would be followed by an economic hangover. Some jobs would leave, while the LNG project would preclude other, more sustainable economic development from happening.

"The eco-devo crowd has been operating under the assumption that they can determine what kind of jobs will happen here, and for 35 years everything they've tried has failed," he said. "This project is the exception that proves the rule. The reason they're here is that no one else wanted them, and Coos Bay is so desperate it will take anything."

Divisive development

The LNG project has been divisive since it was first announced.

Some residents like Lilli Clausen bemoan the potential direct impact on their businesses. The 36-inch diameter Pacific Connector pipeline would be dug into a trench in Haynes Inlet, just off the loading dock for her oyster business. It then would travel 2.4 miles west to its landfall on the North Spit – right past the oyster beds she relies on.

Clausen and others worry that sediment would blanket the oyster beds, and that toxins that have been trapped in the mud for decades would be re-injected into the food chain of both oysters and salmon in the estuary.

Others, like real estate agent Randy Basinger, think the LNG terminal will turn away tourism and retirees. Coos Bay isn't Florence or Brookings, but it's affordable, the quality of life is high, and retirees are still attracted to amenities like the airport and local hospital. But an LNG terminal, he says "will kill it."

"If you were considering retiring on the Oregon Coast would you want to locate in a community that's putting a 14-story bomb in a dangerous location?" he asks.

Project supporters say naysayers are spreading misinformation, whether it's about "blast zones," disruption to harbor traffic due to exclusion zones around tankers, or the social problems that could descend on Coos Bay with 2,000 temporary workers camped under the North Bend Bridge.

"Much focus comes from people on the worst case scenario," said Slater from the Chamber of Commerce. "What's the likelihood? It's extremely rare that something like that would ever happen. We do believe in our regulators."

That faith is hardly universal. Opponents claim the local zoning process is being steamrolled by Jordan Cove's lawyers, its money, and 10 years worth of lobbying on arcane issues that average citizens aren't prepared to evaluate. They contend the state's regulatory machinery, once lauded for its environmental credibility, has been outdated for more than a decade, and is overmatched by energy company money. The Feds, they believe, are simply rubber-stamping the project.

Support for Jordan Cove has grown among statewide elected officials, though some are reluctant to take a definitive stand on the project and insist it still must meet environmental and land use standards.

Critics also downplay the economic impact of 150 jobs, likening it to a new Walmart. And they're incredulous that a Canadian-based energy company might qualify for eminent domain, and force its feeder pipeline though hundreds of miles of forest and farmland, including unwilling landowners.

The latest point of contention is the so-called Community Enhancement Plan, a blueprint being shopped around town that details how the economic windfall that comes with the LNG project will be divided.

The plan's architects envision Jordan Cove paying some $400 million in community service fees, in lieu of property taxes, three quarters of it to two nonprofit foundations. Those entities would, in turn, funnel the money to education and economic development on the waterfront.

From backers' standpoint, the plan allows the community to spread the wealth over a broader geographic area, creates endowments to fund services long term, and prevents the state from sucking up a big chunk of the local school taxes under its school funding equalization model.

Opponents of the plan, some of whom support Jordan Cove, says its akin to a bloodless coup, moving government money into private entities that aren't directly accountable to the public, nor transparent.

Supporter or opponent, many community members and business are reluctant to voice their opinion at all, for fear of being blacklisted by those who disagree with them.

"I'll get a lot more business out of people earning a good wage than I will out of a bunch of people working at a golf course or a casino," said Bill Whitmer, the owner of Betty Kay Fishing Charters in the neighboring community of Charleston.

But he says "you can't really voice your opinion without offending half the people, and since you need both halves to run your business, you keep your trap shut."